David Menninger's Analyst Perspectives

I am happy to share some insights about IBM drawn from our latest Value Index research, which provides an analytic representation of our assessment of how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The Ventana Research Value Index: Analytics and Business Intelligence 2019 is the distillation of a year of market and product research efforts by Ventana Research. We utilized a structured research methodology that includes evaluation categories designed to reflect the breadth of the real-world criteria incorporated in a request for proposal (RFP) and vendor selection process for analytics and business intelligence. We evaluated IBM and 14 other vendors in seven categories, five relevant to the product (adaptability, capability, manageability, reliability and usability) and two related to the vendor (TCO/ROI and vendor validation). To arrive at the Value Index rating for a given vendor, we weighted each category to reflect its relative importance in an RFP process, with the weightings based on our experience and data derived from our benchmark research on analytics and business intelligence.

IBM offers a comprehensive product line including products for discovery, interactive dashboards, reporting, planning and predictive analytics. It is one of the few vendors we evaluated to offer this breadth of functionality. The architecture of the offerings is based on a combination of data loaded into the system and dynamic queries of data in place. The company continues to integrate its various analytics products and as it advances that integration will make it easier for organizations to take advantage of IBM’s wide range of functionality.

IBM ranks third overall in the Value Index assessment. Because of its breadth of functionality it similarly ranks third in Capability. IBM and its products also performed well in the Adaptability and Validation categories. The products support a wide variety of configurations and can be integrated into various business processes. The company has a large number of references and provides quality case studies to help prospects understand how others use their products. IBM ranks third in TCO/ROI with good information and tools to establish the business case and strategic value of its product.

The company’s lowest ranking is in Reliability where it nonetheless places fifth. Better server scalability and performance would help improve its ranking here. Better integration of the various products in its portfolio would help to improve the product’s performance in the Usability and Manageability categories.

This assessment was based on IBM’s analytics products available in August of 2018. In November 2018 IBM released Cognos 11.1, which was a major upgrade to the product. I’ve covered key aspects of the new release here.

This research-based index is the most comprehensive assessment of the value of analytics and business intelligence software in the industry. You can learn more about IBM and others using our Value Index as an effective vendor selection and RFI/RFP tool; read the report here.

Regards,
David Menninger
SVP & Research Director